Fallow Fields, Broken Tooth

On rest and writing and walking the dog

A crisis of words

All the good ones are written

All the sad songs, sung.

#sadhaiku

I live in an agricultural area. Yes, there’s a Walmart two kilometres away, but there’s also a farmer’s field seven houses away. From the street where I walk my dog, it seems like a small field, perhaps two-hundred feet of frontage, stretching back five acres from the road. It is flanked on one side by a tall, neat row of cedars – the neighbour’s windbreak actually – and on the other, a dense, chaotic delight: a copse of black maples, poplar, and pine. And there’s one majestic old weeping willow, stooped like a tired but commanding figure, it’s tendrils nearly sweeping the top of the underbrush. Walk the dog after dusk in the summer and that copse comes alive, a literal concert of buzzing cicadas, chirping crickets, singing birds. And every concert needs a lightshow: look again to the underbrush and the fireflies have added their own frenetic disco ball to light your way as the sun goes down. If you’re very, very lucky, you might see movement and realize a deer or possum or fox or racoon or the dread coyote have stopped by the party.

This is all to say nothing of the bounty that the ground yields. It’s almost never the same two years in a row. Tomatoes, corn, and soy are a given around here and those are often in rotation, but this particular field gets creative and diverse. Having lived here now for more than a dozen years, I have become pretty good at guessing the crop by the first green leaves sprouting in the spring. Guessing what will grow in Firefly Field is an early May pleasure. Every other year or so it’s one of the big three, but in between are surprises. Cabbages, Brussels sprouts, sugar beets*– last year it was pumpkins, which almost stumped us because squash plants all look the same until the size of the fruit outgrows your doubts.

It’s my favourite field in town – yes, we all who live here have our favourites.

And this year, nothing grew.

The willow wept, the fireflies flickered, and the ground stayed bare. In April we wondered if the farmer was just delaying, and theorized on what a late-start crop might be. But by May we understood that this year, the field would remain fallow. Resting the soil, allowing nitrogen and oxygen and nutrients to rebalance is important for retaining the health of a growing bed. Crops give but they also deplete, and this latent period is crucial.

knee-high by the fourth of July

I promise, this is not just a re-hashing of a well-worn metaphor. But in a way it is, because we want to learn from, take comfort in, the established and meaningful cycles we see all around us.

Two years ago this week, I handed in the very final version of Yellow Birds, all edits complete, the draft as perfect as it was ever going to be. What an exciting, terrifying, possible time. It was the end of a very long journey to my first novel’s publication, and the start of an exquisite, stressful, amazing adventure that still continues.

But that was two years ago. The book has now been on store shelves for a year and a half. Real or not, it feels like the next one should be imminent, ready to go.

I am a slow, perfectionist novel writer and therefore a fast editor. But even for a slow writer, I have begun to feel like all the momentum I built with Yellow Birds – a lovely audience, fantastic reviews, awards, a Kirkus star – is slipping away, month by month, unfished chapter by unfinished chapter. I am drifting into irrelevance.

This is the worst kind of thinking and the worst aspect of the impatient, insatiable, inattentive culture we have built into existence. It’s also perhaps not at all truth, but in my more panicked moments (and there are many), it is my perception, and perception is reality.

This past year I definitely weathered a period of burnout, and we all need rest, but I ventured pretty deep into avoidance and procrastination which is what “writer’s block” actually is for me. I don’t want to be the farmer’s fallow field. I want to be the constant, buzzy, creative copse at the edge: the singing bird, the underbrush dancing with fireflies, the wise, strong willow reaching to assure the ground that it exists.

***

10 days ago, I was felled by a bad tooth. Previously root-canaled, the tooth broke and had to be extracted. I was not prepared for how invasive or painful the procedure would be. An appointment a couple of weeks earlier to free the tooth of the little broken piece had been quick and easy. But this, with the oral surgeon, which should have tipped me off, rendered me almost useless and undesiring of doing anything beyond the things I absolutely had to do.

It hurt, it felt gross, I was swollen and I had a very nasty reaction to all the lidocaine, which I am allergic to (all my healthcare providers know this and we do what we must to mitigate risk). I didn’t eat anything solid for 8 days. My liver is either a superhero or about to give out due to all the prescriptions I’ve been on. I know that this has all been exacerbated by some sandwich-generation stress that had to hit crisis level at exactly the same time, but the result was that, by the end of the day, I was left with almost no energy to do anything besides binge-watch ER in bed. Make no mistake, I’m often happy to sit in bed binge-watching ER even when I’m not recovering from dental surgery, but something funny happened this time. I got bored. I got tired of being tired and as soon as I had a bit of extra energy back, I opened my computer out of desire and not just guilt; inspiration and not just toil. Take away the opportunity and ability to do the thing, and all I wanted was the chance to do the thing. Of course this is how writing works a lot of the time – I am never so motivated to write creatively as when I have to instead spend my time and brainpower on something else – but in this case, I hadn’t been working on anything else. There was no other project, no other deadline, no other work splitting my focus. I was resting. I was fallow. I thought I would love imposed rest, but I did not. I loved it until I hated it. So I guess it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

***

I’ve never been on an all-inclusive vacation. I keep telling my husband that I want to go to a resort, where there is nothing to do but lounge in the sun or the sand or the water. No responsibilities but to show up for meals other people have prepared and truly rest or recharge. “You will hate it, “ he says simply. I have started to believe him.

***

I still walk the dog by Firefly Field almost every evening. It’s darker and quieter right now, but I also know how beautiful it becomes with a glaze of snow and the moon’s bouncing light. Winter is long but it will pass. The book is almost done. I can’t wait to see what new crop welcomes the spring.

*sugar beets look like gigantic turnips the size of a curling rock and are grown here for only one purpose – to be turned into the road “salt” that melts the ice on Toronto roads and highways every year!